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Lausanne's EPFL has been ranked the fourth most innovative in Europe in the first ever Reuters Top 100: Europe's Most Innovative Universities ranking launched on Tuesday.

Established in its current form in 1968, the EPFL is a sister school to the prestigious ETH technology school in Zurich.

With around 10,000 students – half of them from Switzerland and the other half from around the world – the EPFL came in fourth in the Reuters rankings behind top-place getters Belgium’s KU Leuven, Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge.

The Reuters rankings comprised ten different metrics including patent filing, patents granted and commercial impact, or the extent to which research at an institution has affected commercial research and development activities.

With its innovation park housing both startups and massive companies like Nestle and Siemens, the EPFL scored particularly well in terms of commercial impact, scoring 84.8 points against an average of 48.7.

The EPFL is one of four Swiss universities to make the new Reuters list with the University of Zurich at number 10, Zurich’s ETH at number 13 and the University of Basel at number 33.

Germany, meanwhile, has the most institutions on the list – 24 in total – while the UK can boast 17.

The Reuters ranking is just the latest in a series of good results for the EPFL.

In April, it was voted the best ‘young’ university in the world in the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings of universities under 50 years old for the second year in a row.

In March, the university was named Europe’s 11th best in the THE’s Europe ranking while it is currently ranking 48th globally by the same organization.